AdaptNSW Climate Change Website Case Study

AdaptNSW website displayed in a laptop

Updating AdaptNSW to increase climate change awareness and drive behavioural change

About AdaptNSW

The AdaptNSW website – produced by the Office of Energy and Climate Change – exists to inform and empower communities, businesses, households and government to adapt to climate change.

The challenge

The AdaptNSW website was visually and technically dated, and it failed to meet the needs of diverse visitor groups. Sitback’s redesign aimed to resolve these issues, whilst also adding important new functionality and improving accessibility.

Project highlights

Modern design

The purpose of the former AdaptNSW site was unclear and its layout wasn’t useful. Sitback’s restructured navigation helps to steer visitors to relevant content and improves ease of use for the AdaptNSW team.

Interactive features

The addition of engaging new features—including a custom-built climate change map modelled on multiple datasets—increased average time-on-page by 22%.

Accessible & compliant

Sitback’s redesigned Drupal website brought OECC into compliance with government design standards and WCAG 2.1 AA, increasing access to this important information.

The AdaptNSW website has been recognised as a winner in the “Building A Better Tomorrow” category of the Acquia Engage Awards 2022.

Acquia Engage Awards 2022 Winners Badge - Sitback Solutions - Building a Better Tomorrow
AdaptNSW website shown in a laptop

“When the website was first designed, it was built around the delivery of climate change projections and data, and it focussed on a fairly narrow customer audience of practitioners. We learned that the people who were coming to the website were after some basic information about climate change. That was a clear gap for us—we needed to send them through the journey on the website to information on how to tangibly respond and act.”

Illustration of a young man from the waist up

Aaron Coutts-Smith

Senior Team Leader, Net Zero Implementation at OECC

The outcome

Delivering against multiple priorities with best-in-class design and development practices

Following Sitback’s deployment of the new AdaptNSW website, total visitors to the site have increased by 51%. Further, a 22% increase in average time-on-page suggests that users are now better able to navigate and engage with the site’s content.

Yet the full impact of the new site’s launch can’t be measured in numbers alone. As climate change increasingly impacts our lives, resources like AdaptNSW will play a critical role in driving behavioural change by encouraging citizens to take positive action whilst adapting to changes that are already occurring in our world.

“One of the advantages of shifting to the new website was creating opportunities to be more spontaneous—to be able to lift specific content to the front page that was very topical. Being able to connect people more quickly with the information that is relevant at the time is definitely a benefit.”

Stephen Alessi, Project Officer at OECC

Key features

Flexible Drupal CMS

Custom interactive climate map

22% increase in time on page

Codebase white-labelled for re-use

Faster update deployment time

NSW Gov Digital Design System compliant

Read the full, in-depth AdaptNSW case study

In a separate article, we’ve taken a deep dive into the entire AdaptNSW project, covering everything from the project background to the technology used and the range of benefits that AdaptNSW have enjoyed since launching the new website.

Read the deep dive AdaptNSW case study.

We have extensive experience working with government departments, implementing the NSW Digital Design System and taking a citizen-first approach to product design. To find out how we can help you too, get in touch.

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